Monday, April 25, 2011

It is moving to hear that the Baghdad Museum is going to honor the late Donny George by dedicating a conference hall in his name, and also interesting to hear that the museum continues to receive stolen items from Syria and that Syria and Jordan appear to have been on the smuggling trail (or perhaps it is just that the Jordanian and Syrian police have been more effective than, say, the Iranian or Gulf state police in tracking items down):

He said the museum received recently 32 more stolen items from Syria. More than 750 pieces have been handed to the Museum by the Syrian authorities so far. Jordan has sent back to Iraq 2,466 stolen pieces. More artifacts were recovered in the U.S., Holland, Sweden, Germany, Poland and Peru.

Sunday, April 24, 2011

Peter Der Manuelian, Philip J. King Professor of Egyptology at Harvard, is a brilliant archaeologist as well as a very nice fellow (I met him recently at a lecture I was giving for University of Chicago alumni at his stomping grounds). But the scholarly rigor that characterizes his academic research is sadly lacking in the opinion piece he published recently in Newsweek, Protecting Egypt's Heritage Post-Revolution - Newsweek. Here's how Der Manuelian describes what has happened this year:

In the space of a few short weeks, the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) broke away from the Ministry of Culture to become its own ministry; then Mubarak was toppled, the police disappeared, and some sites, including the famous Egyptian Museum in Cairo, were looted. Hawass stepped down to protest the looting; the SCA temporarily lost its independent ministry status; and the new prime minister, Essam Sharaf, could not choose a successor to fill the power vacuum. This created an unfortunate window of opportunity at some sites for armed criminals to overpower the unarmed guards and break into antiquities-storage magazines.

This timeline is both inaccurate and incomplete. The Museum was looted before Mubarak was toppled, not after, and looting of sites and storerooms also began before Mubarak stepped down -- began because the police disappeared, almost certainly on orders from Mubarak. Hawass did step down to protest the looting, but before the museum was attacked he seems to have done little or nothing to secure it, despite the pitched battle that took place in front of it just days before the break-in, and in the weeks following he repeatedly gave out information that was misleading in ways designed to downplay what had gone wrong at the museum as well as what was going wrong on sites and at storehouses. Speaking of the antiquites-storage magazines, Der Manuelian has the timeline wrong here as well. The window of opportunity Der Manuelian talks about did not open because Hawass' resignation created a power vacuum: storage magazines were being attacked before Hawass resigned as well as afterward.

Why this slipshod approach to the facts? The answer is clear from the fulsome praise Der Manuelian heaps upon Hawass' performance at the helm of the SCA and from his contention that "few others could fill the post at this delicate time." I am not sure that I agree on that point, though I share Der Manuelian's view that Hawass has done great good work over the years for Egypt's cultural heritage and for archaeology in general (including, by the way, co-editing a volume in 2010 with Der Manuelian), and it is easy to see why foreign archaeologists might be not just wary of criticizing someone so powerful but truly and honestly in favor of keeping him in charge because he makes it easier to undertake digs there.

But all the good Hawass has done cannot be a reason for sweeping under the rug the facts about his performance during the crisis. He must be held responsible for not having thought carefully enough or developed contingency plans in advance to deal with the eventuality of a breakdown in the normal policing functions of the state. The lessons of Iraq, where the toppling of the state left a security vacuum in which the museum and then Iraq's sites were massively plundered, were clear, but ignored. After the clashes began in Tahrir Square, he should have ordered the Cairo Museum completely locked down, and some of the 30,000-plus employees under Hawass' authority should have been dragooned, or at least asked to volunteer, to stand guard together at the museum, at sites and at storehouses, as was done with workers at the Baghdad Museum just before the 2003 invasion.

One might add that foreign archaeologists and museums engaged in excavations in Egypt also should have been thinking before the fact about the need to secure sites and storehouses in the event of political unrest that was as predictable in general terms as an earthquake; Hawass' failure to have done so is of a piece with general disinterest on the part of both archaeologists and collecting institutions in the unsexy, unintellectual, and sometimes brutal task of securing sites, museums, and storehouses against looters.

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

The New York Times, apparently. While there are real stories that need investigating -- i.e., how it could possibly be that a museum employee could just happen to be in a Cairo train station and notice a bag that turns out to contain pieces stolen from the museum, or why it is that the museum was not more fully locked down in the days before it was looted, or why the guards on Egypt's sites and at their storerooms were either not armed or inadequately armed to prevent gangs of looters from overrunning them -- the Times lazily trolls blogs for a tempest in a teapot regarding Hawass' deal with a clothing line manufacturer. The lede of the story exhibits a very distressing blindness about what really matters:

Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s longtime chief antiquities official, has been criticized in recent months for many things: his closeness to former President Hosni Mubarak, some inconsistent reports on the safety of archaeological sites during the uprising and for his role in a dispute over an Egyptian museum bookstore, for which he now possibly faces jail time.

At the very least, "inconsistent reports on the safety of archaeological sites during the uprising" should read "his failure to secure the Egypt Museum and archaeological sites during and after the uprising". But one would have hoped that someone at the Times had a better sense of stories worth spending journalistic energy on.

Monday, April 04, 2011

Ahram reports that five days after meeting with the prime minister, Zahi Hawass has been officially reappointed, and more important, has held a half-hour meeting with the general who heads Egypt's armed forces

to discuss security measures necessary to safeguard Egypt’s antiquities and efforts to be exerted to restore Egypt’s looted artefacts in collaboration with the world community and UNESCO.

Hawass told Ahram Online that the first order of the day is to repel the 500 encroachments on archaeological sites that have been found within the past two weeks, as well as the resumption of projects that were on halt due to the revolution.

The term "encroachments" normally does not refer to the storming of warehouses by armed gangs and to the digging of sites by armed looters, but to local squatters building cemeteries, houses, and farms on top of sites. The latter is a longstanding ongoing problem that Hawass has held conferences on in the past, and no doubt it is a problem that has worsened over the past two months. But to argue that it is "the first order of the day" at a time when sites and storerooms are under siege reflects a very odd sense of priorities. One would have thought that after all this time Hawass would have gone into the meeting with the general with an action plan in hand to beef up site and storeroom security, and that he would have emerged announcing it was being put into effect. The lack of any such announcement is very disappointing.

Sunday, April 03, 2011

Another report of inadequately armed and inadequate numbers of Egyptian watchmen being driven off of archaeological sites by gangs armed with automatic weapons:

The watchmen complained that the small number of watchmen and their inadequate weapons facilitates made it difficult to protect such archeological sites.

Watchman Ruby Mohamed Abdel Salam said he worked with nine other watchmen to guard the 600 acre site in shifts. He said that he and his fellow watchmen were only armed with 9 mm pistols, which are no match for the automatic weapons used by the armed groups, especially considering the large area of land they are guarding. Abdel Salam also complained that their bullet supplies are running low.

If Zahi Hawass is really back in control of an organization 30,000 strong, backed by the interim government, how can it be that there aren't even enough bullets for the handguns, not to mention better weaponry and more guards?

Reports from Luxor Times and Al Ahram to the effect that ten armed masked men broke into a storehouse in Tel El daba', Facous, Sharkia governate, which was guarded by a policeman and three "Ghafir" guards working for the SCA; it is not completely clear from the reports if all four were armed but the Luxor Times describes the gang as having taken away "their weapons", so it appears that more than one was armed, though no information is provided as to whether these arms were handguns or automatic weapons. The gang apparently caught these four by surprise, or perhaps they were unwilling to engage in a firefight they would probably have lost, or perhaps they feared having their families targeted if they fought back (this was a common problem in Iraq where both site guards and looters often were locals who knew each other).

This is by no means the first time since the revolution that an armed gang has attacked a storeroom, but by now one would have hoped that the SCA and the Egyptian government would have responded by providing their own guards and police with the arms and additional security needed to fend off such attempts. But with the country still in transitional turmoil, and Zahi Hawass first in then out then in, that has proved difficult.

Clearly, more needs to be done to protect all storerooms (not to mention sites!). This particular storeroom contained artifacts excavated by Dutch and German archaeologists over the last thirty years; other storerooms that have been looted also have contained the fruits of foreign-led excavations (including one by the ultra-wealthy Metropolitan Museum). One wonders what steps, if any, those archaeological organizations and their governments might be taking now to beef up security at least for the artifacts that their archaeologists helped bring out of the ground. Obviously it would be difficult if not impossible for a foreign group to arm Egyptian guards, but surely there must be other steps that could be taken to help, including paying locals to set up a monitoring system to warn guards of impending attacks, providing remote sensing devices to detect intruders, hardening the sites themselves, etc. Does anyone out there know if any such plans are afoot?

Saturday, April 02, 2011

This report discusses the arrests of three men caught digging an archaeological site in Italy. The banal fact that even in relatively rich nations there are going to be looters, especially if the objects to be uncovered are potentially as valuable as the carnelian these tombaroli found, is of little interest. What is highly illuminating, though, is what this operation shows about how complex it is to do successful site policing. Guards on site are the least of it. The site inspectors for the region must undertake preventive patrols assisted by helicopters (in this case from the equivalent of the Coast Guard) and by the carabinieri. Pull out any one of these elements and the chances of stopping looters drops precipitously. In Egypt, of course, the SCA seems to have had little or no policing capacity of its own, and the Interior Ministry -- the equivalent of the carabinieri -- melted away once the revolution began.